As a necessary preliminary to testing for natural selection, the researchers looked at the racial composition of the Bengali population and found that they are an Indian population with a 9 percent admixture of East Asian genes, probably Chinese. The admixture occurred almost exactly 52 generations ago, according to statistical calculation, or around A.D. 500, assuming 29 years per generation. The Gupta empire in India was in decline at this time, but it is unclear whether the intermarriage with East Asians took place through trade or conquest. “We can now go back to the historians and see what happened then,” Dr. Karlsson said.

But sometimes science gets garbled in transmission. What do they say in the paper? Again, the relevant section:

Recently I was tipped off to the appearance of a new paper, Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies Chromosome 10q24.32 Variants Associated with Arsenic Metabolism and Toxicity Phenotypes in Bangladesh. This is the section which caught my eye: “Using data on urinary arsenic metabolite concentrations and approximately 300,000 genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for 1,313 arsenic-exposed Bangladeshi individuals.” 300 K SNPs with 1,313 Bangladeshi individuals is a lot! I’m interested in this data set because of the 200+ participants in the Harappa Ancestry Project my parents remain the “unadmixed” South Asians with the highest fraction of East Asian ancestry (10-15 percent). Within South Asia aside from those groups with clear East Asian affinities only peoples of Munda background have the same levels. This data set could answer a lot of questions as to the typicality of my parents (literally within a few hours in terms of data exploration). But this is all you get in the supplements:

The pith:In this post I examine the most recent results from 23andMe for my family in the context of familial and regional (Bengal) history. I also use these results to offer up a framework for the ethnognesis of the eastern Bengali people within the last 1,000 years, and their relationship to other South Asian and Southeast Asian populations.

Since I received my 23andMe results last May I’ve been blogging about it a fair amount. In a recent post I inferred that perhaps I had a recent ancestor who was an ethnic Burman or some related group. My reasoning was that this explained a pattern of elevated matches on chromosomal segments with populations from southwest China in the HGDP data set. But now we have more than my genome to go on. This week I got the first V3 chip results from a sibling. And finally, yesterday the results from my parents came in. One thing that I immediately found interesting was my father’s mtDNA haplogroup assignment, G1a2. This came from his maternal grandmother, and as you can see it has a distribution which is mostly outside of South Asia. In case you care, I asked my father her background, and like my patrilineage she was a “Khan,” though an unrelated one (“Khan” is just an honorific). I received these results before the total genome assessment, and so initially assumed this confirmed my hunch that my father had some unknown recent ancestry of “eastern” provenance. But it turns out my hunch is probably wrong. In fact, my parents have about the same “eastern” proportion, with my mother slightly more! My expectation was that perhaps my mother would be around 25-30% “Asian,” and my father above 50%. The reality turns out that my father is 38%, and my mother 40%.

Below are the “Ancestry Paintings” generated by 23andMe for my family (so far). What you see are the 22 non-sex chromosomes, which have two copies each, and assignments to “Asian,” “European,” and “African,” ancestry groups. The reference populations to generate these assignments come from the HapMap, the northern European sample of white Americans from Utah, Chinese from Beijing, Japanese from Tokyo, and ethnic Yoruba from Nigeria. What the assignment to one of these classes denotes is that that region of the genome is closest to that category in identity. It does not imply that your recent ancestry is European or Asian (African is probably a different matter, but there are many complaints about the results for African Americans and East Africans in the 23andMe forums). This caveat is especially important for South Asians, because we generally find that we’re ~75% European and ~25% Asian. All that means is that though most of our genetic affinity is with Europeans, a smaller fraction seems to resemble Asians more. Via “gene sharing” on 23andMe I can see that the Asian fraction varies from ~35% in South India and Sri Lanka, to ~10% in Pakistan and Punjab. This is not because South Indians have more East Asian ancestry than Punjabis. Rather, to a great extent the South Asian genome can be decomposed into two ancestral elements, one with a distant, but closer, affinity to populations of eastern Eurasia, and one with a close affinity to populations of western Eurasia. What some have termed “Ancient South Indians” (ASI) and “Ancient North Indians” (ANI). ASI ancestry, which is probably just a touch under 50% in South Asians overall, seems to shake out then as somewhat more Asian than European.* The fraction of ASI increases as one moves south and east in South Asia (and as one moves down the caste status ladder).

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